What, You Never Heard of a Noise Emitting Diode Before?

From the earliest days of my career in electrical engineering, I have noticed that engineers have a penchant for naming things. Names like Hewlett-Packard, Wang, and Rand Corp. have obvious etymologies, but others can be somewhat obscure or subject to cultural sensitivities. Obscure names for companies like Accenture, Ampire, and n*Ask, seem to be on the rise. So what is an “accenture” -- an accent, a venture?

Other names that are now ubiquitous in the public landscape may have turned out differently in an earlier generation: Microsoft might have been a lingerie company; Yahoo and Google could have been “girly” magazines; and FireFox would likely have been banned by PETA.

Strangely enough, Compaq Computer actually made computers that were compact; Bell Labs did research related to things with bells (telephones); International Business Machines (IBM) internationally sold business machines; and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) made advanced micro devices. One could make the case that company names are driven more by marketing types than by engineers, so let’s explore names that arise within the field of hardware design.

Thirty years ago, I was developing a high-speed image memory plane. In order to “pipeline” writes to the memory and prevent flicker on the display, there were two banks in the memory plane. When one was being displayed, the other was being written to. When writes were complete, the display was “ping-ponged” to the other bank. The signal that gave the status that this transition was about to occur was aptly named PPP (ping-pong pending). One of my early successes as a hardware design engineer was selling that name to the lead engineer.

Later, I worked on a team that developed interface boards that adhered to the VME Bus standard. Every read and write cycle was completed by asserting the DTACK (DaTa ACKnowledge) signal. The timing was a “pain in the rear,” hence the name “DTACK” would have been memorable (if you get my “point”).

Another issue that we had with the VME bus standard was that, although there was a priority scheme that VME bus masters used to adjudicate priority, there was no way to tell exactly when a bus master would relinquish the bus after a higher-priority bus master requested priority.

Given the nature of our system, my old boss, Bob Buxton, thought it wise to implement all bus masters in a manner that would limit how many transfers they could do in one bus priority request interval. He chose 32 transfers (128 bytes) for the size of these “Buxton Blocks,” as we soon nicknamed them. Fifteen years later, I was debugging some built-in test equipment (BITE) code and ran across the term “Buxton Blocks” in the comments… definitely gave me a chuckle after all those years.

I think every hardware designer has had the experience of overdriving a zener diode, thereby creating a NED (noise emitting diode). When I was at Georgia Tech, someone in the switching lab used a capacitor with too low a voltage rating in his power supply. The loud “POP!” gave us the impression that he had created a very efficient signal-to-noise converter.

Think back over your own career and see what funny names you recall using in your own designs. Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor?

back in the very early days of IC's one of our engineers got a couple of plastic parts and tried to solder them to a bredboard with a 200+ watt soldering gun. The Ic's melted. We figured IC's would never make it....

I recall a postal sorting machine prototype that I worked on in the early 1990's that periodically would make a loud bang and one of the integrated circuits would look like a cigarette lighter with a flame shooting out of the middle. We called it the flamethrower ... eventually the root cause was traced to a metal rail short circuiting out the power supply with adverse results.

Back in the early 70s when I was a sophomore in college, Popular Electronics had a circuit for a "Chatter Jammer," a pink noise generator. It back-biased a transistor junction (effectively a diode) into breakdown with a 9V battery to generate a hissing noise that was amplified by a second transistor. I sent off for the kit and built it into a small box with crystal earphones. It was a way of blocking out noise so one could concentrate. I even took it in to a Physics exam. The professor looked at me strangely and I said it had all the answers built in to it. He came over and I told him the real purpose -- to block out external noise so I could concentrate; he listened to it and let me keep it for the exam. It's still sitting around somewhere ...

Near the end of freshman year of college I taught myself IBM 360 Assembler as a special project in a PL/I class, writing a crude four-function calculator that used the system console for input and output. The Assembler had an instruction, DC, to define a constant. I gathered all my DC instructions into one section of code and, having been born in Washington, DC, labled it "Washington Section," for all the DCs.

We can test silicon in packages, bare chips, wafers, modules, on lead frames, and in trays. The latter has been used in with varying degrees of success over the years. The TLA that stuck was TTT, although another TLA jumps out. There are still companies out there trying to milk this technology. Er, er...

I must beg to differ with you on the electrolytic cap! Way back 50 years ago I had a "part-time" (only 50-60 hours a week) job as an engineering tech while I was finishing my BSEE. One of our products was a controller for DC motors and solenoids that ran at a nominal 90VDC. We didn't have a power supply that could support that voltage at the current level required, so I haywired a hefty silicon diode and a 200VDC BIG computer-grade electrolytic to a (2-wire) line cord. The half-wave rectification gave a pretty good 90VDC under load. Late one night the chief engineer (named Murphy, REALLY) and I were working in a very crowded lab area testing the controller, when a momentary surge overloaded the rectifier and turned in into a dead short! It took only a fraction of a second for the huge aluminum can of the lytic to explode violently, showering us with foil confetti along with a DEAFENING roar. The chief engineer (being a good Irishman, he was "well-oiled" by then) slowly turned to me and said, "Did something just happen?" True story!

When I was working in South Africa 20+ years ago we were doing some work for a company called Bothma, Searle and Wilk (apparently they are still in business). At the time two circuses (Circi?) merged to become Boswell-Wilkie Circus. My mind made the leap to Bothma-Wilk Searlcus, but it quickly evolved that we just referred to BS&W as "the circus". I hasten to add that it was no reflection on the organization, just a quick way to refer to them.

We always called them SEDs - smoke emitting diodes. The most memorable one was a MOSFET in a DDPAK (surface mount TO-220) connected to a 400W power supply. The assembly tech asked for help because the instrument wouldn't turn on. We turned the unit on its side to get a better look, and a few seconds after applying power the DDPAK desoldered itself and fell off the PCB. If only it were always that easy...